“Sod the wine, I want to suck on the writing. This man White is an instinctive writer, bloody rare to find one who actually pulls it off, as in still gets a meaning across with concision. Sharp arbitrage of speed and risk, closest thing I can think of to Cicero’s ‘motus continuum animi.’

Probably takes a drink or two to connect like that: he literally paints his senses on the page.”

.

.

30 March 2012

PETER ANDREWS OAM MAKES MUD PIES

The dry-grown stumps of farmer and veterinary surgeon Bill Harbison, who's watching one of Peter Andrews' brand new mini demo wetlands forming along the top of a ridge on Bill's farm in South Australia's mid-north.

Wild Genius Refits Fractal Chaos

Aussie Bioneer Busts It All Up

Sellout Mob Next Time She Rainsstory and photographs by PHILIP WHITE

Peter Andrews OAM is into mud pies.

Having just spent two days with the radical environmentalist
in the Mid North of South Australia, this writer feels like he’s been up and
given his heart to the Lord at a revival crusade, and is still so buzzy at the
epiphanic sight of Andrews playing with mud that attempting to explain it all
here is awesome in the truest sense of the word.

Give Andrews water, and he’ll tip it on the ground, get
down on his knees and start playing with it.
Give him a bulldozer, and he’ll redesign the whole damn farm.

He's a fair dinkum bioneer.

I’d watched the AustralianStory episodes which attempted to account and explain Andrews’ one-eyed
determination to restore buggered Hunter
Valley farmland by
putting some healthy fractal chaos back into it. Contentiously, this usually includes an
initial explosion of weeds, as part of his program of deliberately
disorganising the ground water patterns that farmers have trained and altered, flattened
and straightened for 150 years.

Peter Andrews, left, with George Aldridge and the Harbison brothers, Michael and Bill. Notice Peter's newest wetlands forming just behind his right foot.

It must have been infernally irritating for the ABC producers to
capture the breadth and depth of Andrews’ vision: he talks with barely-measured
agitation, leaping from one confounding fact, theory or anecdote to another, covering
the most complex realms of hydrology, hydrogeology, plant physiology,
geomorphology, climate, carbon and anything else that happens to drift into the
machinegun stream of his infectious imagination, understanding and recollection.

This challenge is so confronting that the brain tends to vague out as one's next question begins to arise before the previous one can possibly form language. One fatigues. Like the disappearing puddles, dubs, duckponds, cattle wallers and sheep wets that once covered this place, Andrews' logic disappears into the fast-drying landscape. Unless you respect it, acknowledge its force, get your beery arse home and think about it. Then take a deep breath, and get the dozer out.

George Aldridge, left, with Peter Andrews.

George Aldridge, the revered painter, illustrator and friend, suggested I
attend the farm of vet Bill Harbison, who’d brought Andrews, his old Gawler horse-training
mate, home to work some magic on the dried-out chip of a farm he’d bought on the
stony ridges one or two windfarms west of Burra, near Spalding. The Yacka Moorundi Land Care Group arranged a
morning of lecture and question-and-answer in the local hall, with mountains of local tucker, then a full afternoon
of field work on Harbison’s farm before a great thirst drove the throng back to the cool Spalding boozer.

Andrews had been at work there - farm not boozer - for some days, building a dead-level
contour to slow and spread the run-off from the top 40% of the hill, and perforating that at the points that needed the water, not simply the creeklines. Then he began dozing
disruptive walls, islands and meanders in the creek line at the foot of the hill. His major
theory is that Australia
has survived because its waters were never particularly big on rushing out to
sea the way we have recently trained them to, with bare earth, lineal concrete gutters
and channels and whatnot.

Andrews explaining how he's rebuilding chaos into the worn-out creekline at Bill Harbison's place in South Australia's mid-north.

“What’s the point of creating a surface that will ensure
rapid run-off, and send all your water down there somewhere, where you dam it,
evaporate it, and then pump what’s left back up here for irrigation? Save your water. Slow it down.
Let it spread. Use your water
where it falls!

“You’ve got sheep. Sheep
will eat ninety per cent of whatever plants you have by the end of the season,
and turn it into neat little pellets.
When it rains, because there’s nothing here to hold it, that all washes
down into the fast-draining creek you’ve made.
You lose it. Ninety per cent of
everything you’ve grown! Then you pay big money trying to replace it with the wrong chemicals.”

When we arrived, he ran a trial run of one of the exercises
he would show the farmers next day.
Basically, he had Bill park his fire-fighting unit at the top of a dry
ridge-top track, and let a few hundred litres of water run out. As it trickled down the hard red dust, it
made eddies and mini wetlands, and sent little spreading floodplains out to the
sides.

This is the same infant microswamp photographed the night before in the shot at the top. The feather's still there. A vehicle has driven right through the middle of it, the opposite of the plan, yet even that simple accident has put more chaos into the stream. It'll all begin again, if it's allowed.

Andrews grinned with the satisfaction of a four year old in
a taddy puddle. “See?” he
marveled. “Wetlands! And look what happens when I put this rock
back here, or put some of this dead grass across here! What if I make a little embankment across
here. Look at that water: look! It’s going sideways! It wants to spread! It’s spreading seeds and nutrient across your
country! Look at that froth! It’s
forming its own retaining embankments and pools!”

When he repeated the exercise to the keen, curious and often sceptical mob of farmers who came
next day, they stood gazing in silence, absorbing Andrews’ disarming display, remembering
what it was like to play in the mud as they watched the delight of the infant
lass there who couldn’t believe her luck.
Adults who made mud pies. Amongst
the disarming innocence of it all, the most obvious reality was the most
sobering: farming science, politics, bureaucracies and population have forgotten
about country. They’ve lost it. And this dried out old chip of a joint we call
Australia
-- from austerous via austral: southern, harsh, severe – will
buck us off if we don’t very quickly revolutionise the way we see it.

And how good are our kids gonna be if they don't get their fair share of mud to grow up in? They'll die of allergy in a world of too many clean flat things. And one suspects by the fierce glare in Andrews' bright eyes that he thinks we're about to starve to death watching them.

Like a good geologist, Andrews thinks in 3-D. He reads landscape quickly, always imagining
how he’d rework it, to put it back more like the intricate way it worked before
we cut everything up into little squares and killed anything that grew there that we could not sell.

Some of the very old geology in Bill Harbison's hill. This is from the Burra group, which fills the gap between the Umberatana (650-750 million years back) and the top of the Paleoproterozoic Basement (1.6 billion). It seems that Peter Andrews wants to put some of this ancient chaotic energy back on top.

He’s radical. He
believes grass is a monoculture, and that eucalypts are too.

“Somebody said to me ‘Look this is a eucalyptus forest:
there’s sixty different types in there’, and I say ‘Eucalypts, like grass, is a
species. This forest is a monoculture’.”

When challenged by Sally Hawker of North Bungaree Station why he wouldn’t just go out on
Bill’s stony hill and plant some lovely natural gum trees, he said “What? Plant the most water-wasting things
you can get? A plant that guzzles
enormous amounts of water from your ground until it’s all gone, when it gets
the sulks and covers its leaves with protective wax and goes toxic, so nothing
else can compete?”

When quizzed about weeds, he pulled an unpopular type aside and pointed
out the number of grasses and tiny plants that were thriving below its shelter,
in the humidity its shade created.

“Now I’ve pulled this out,” he said, plucking the offending
intruder, “you come back after two days of sun and tell me how these little
plants are going where they were enjoying that shelter. And we'll leave this one here [selecting the next weed along] as our test. See the little grasses underneath there in the shade? I can promise you, that lot will be all right."

The Sermon on the Mount

It is impossible here to explain the vision of Andrews much
beyond that, although I shall attempt to extend this essay once I’ve let my
current headful sink in. It may crawl to the horizon before me.

In the
meantime, you can dig out the essential Australian Story episodes as a primer, check Andrews’ website, which he gets
no time to work on, then read his two books: Back From The Brink and Beyond
The Brink.

A really good backgrounder is the extended interview with John Williams, a former Head of Land and Water at the CSIRO, on the Australian Story website.

And the notion of imposing this practical intelligence on
the Big Rivers while there’s plenty of water has him glowing with excitement,
but that’s another 100,000 words. Let it
rest on his suggestion that there’s no better time to change attitudes than one
like this, when politicians, scientists and bureaucracies really do have their
sweaty backs to the wall.

On the phone, comrades!

And yes, I haven’t mentioned wine. One of the reasons I made my way north was my
interest in the crippling salt problems some vignerons are having in the Lower Flinders Ranges winegrape region just over the
range from Harbison’s farm. This is a direct result of their interference
with the chaos of their country: vignerons are amongst the most brutally
efficient organizers of terrain, of waterways and plant species. Plant vineyards on thrashed pastoral country,
and you’ve got trouble. Which is exactly what I recall warning growers the day I opened their new appellation, what, a decade ago?

"Beware the dull mono-cultural petro-industrial grapeyard." That threadbare mantra has got me fired from most of the good newspapers in Australia, but it hasn't yet got me fired from my own blog. So I have a comrade. Andrews’ theories and practical examples are anathema to
most modern Australian viticulture.

It will be a brave industrial winemaking group who first
engages this visionary for some initial technology transfer, but the booze brains
will surely leave buzzing, struggling to understand how Andrews’ challenging
realities and wilder theorisings can assist them improve the vast areas of
ground they have sprayed, fertilized, bashed, and neatly organized to produce
grape ethanol in the most efficient manner possible.

There were no Southern Flinders grape farmers in attendance at Bill Harbison's place.
None from Clare, either. Nobody from the Murray Darling Basin Authority. Or from anywhere much, for that matter. But as Bill Harbison said with a dry
grin, “There’ll be a sell-out mob here next time she rains.”

7 comments:

Just watched Australian Story ... Wow. This man is a genius. I now totally understand your evangelical reaction. Everyone should be doing this. Now! Am now off to see if I can find out more about whether the idiot bureaucrats are any closer to dismounting their high horses and allowing common sense to prevail ...

Long time advocate (38 years) of Peter Andrews... still beavering (not accidental) to get his message across. Our Natural Sequence Association pushes his cause with puny muscles - need more oomph to counteract the naysayers in DAFF, MDBA, CSIRO, DPI and the list goes on. Go to your local member and demand action on the regulations that prevent Andrews' work. More voices singing from the same hymn sheet please.Julia

“The San Ysidro River runs through the San Juan valley, turning and twisting until it discharges sluggishly into Black Rock Bay under the protection of Bat Point. The valley itself is long and not very wide, and the San Ysidro River, having not very far to run, makes the most of what distance it has by moving from one side of the level stretch to the other. Here it cuts under a cliff, against a mountain, and then it spreads thinly out on sand-banks. During a good part of the year there is no surface water at all, and the sandy bed grows full of willows which stretch their roots down toward underground water.

"Rabbits and raccoons and small foxes and coyotes make their homes in the willows of the river bottom when the water is down. At the head of the valley to the north and east the river rises, not as one head, but in many little branches, so that the source on a map looks like a tree with small, leafless branches. The dry and stony hills with shoulders and gullies and canyons do not supply water to the river during all the year, but when the rains fall in the late winter and spring the rocky shoulders absorb a little of the water and cast the rest in black torrents to the little streams that tumble out of the creases, and the streamlets combine and join larger creeks and the reeks come together at the northern end of the valley.

"So it is that in the late spring, when the hills have digested as much rain as they can, a heavy storm may swell the San Ysidro River to a raging flood in a very few hours. Then the foamy yellow water cuts at the banks and great hunks of farmland cave into the river. Then the bodies of cows and sheep go tumbling and rolling in the yellow flood ...” AND WAIT FOR IT... once again the man ties the huge description into one perfect sentence.... “It is an unstable and precocious river; dead during part of the year and deadly during another part.” John Steinbeck, The Wayward Bus, 1947

CONFESSIONS

"After enough years newspapermen begin to pall on other newspapermen; they begin to take their good qualities for granted and wince at their shortcomings, of which the most common are a vanity that sometimes borders on the thespian and a sort of perpetual mental adolescence that I think stems from starting a fresh story every day or every week or month and never having time to get to the bottom of anything. They forget that newspapermen as a class have a yearning for truth as involuntary as a hophead’s addiction to junk. The question of whether the junkie really loves hop is academic; he can’t get along without it. A newspaperman may write a lie to hold his job, but he won’t believe it, and the necessity outrages him so that he craves truth all the more thereafter. A few newspapermen lie to get on in the world, but it outrages them, too, and I have never known a dishonest journalist who wasn’t patently an unhappy bastard."

A.J. Liebling,

war correspondent,

New Yorker,

Algiers,

January 1942.

HEALTH WARNING

"Take the hair", it is well written,"of the dog by which you're bitten.Work off one wine by his brother,chase one poison with another".Antiphanes, 479BC

HEALTH WARNING

"Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples: for I am sick of love."Sheba to Solomon, Song of Songs, which is Solomon's, ch2v5

Coda

(for Laurence Smulders

4 April 1932 - 28 June 1997)

Some go without any money,

Some go without any clothes;

Some go like ants stuck in honey,

Some go where nobody goes.

Philip White

GOOD ISLAMIC ADVICE

“Ale, especially that made from barley, clogs the sinews, causes headache and congestion of the head, yet it overstimulates the action of the kidneys, and, when drunk to excess, lowers the temperature.That, however, which is brewed from wheat, and is flavoured with mint and parsley, is judged better for everybody.Still, in the case of persons exposed to the sun’s heat, in feverish conditions and sultry weather, its use is inadvisable.”

From The Science Of Dining – A Medieval Treatise on the Hygiene of the Table and the Laws of Health, translated from the Latin by Arthur S. Way D. Lit, MacMillan, 1936.Previous translation The Schoolmaster, 1583. Original text from Mohammed ibn Zakariya al Razi, Arabic medical writer (865-925AD).

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by John Peake - about 1955, Broken Hill, Australia. House paint on Masonite, 163 x 110cm